Just got back from "Ti An" at 5604 8th Avenue (mentioned below except now its called Bik Bay?). Mission accomplished. Good broth, good quality, good service, not too crowded (but crowded enough!) and didn't have to spend forty minutes looking for parking.

Dreaming of avoiding the schlep to Jackson Heights, I searched Chowhound to see if there were any quality Indian restaurants in Brooklyn which turned up this thread: Best Indian in Brooklyn?. Turns out there are some promising choices right down the street from us on Coney Island Avenue. This thread goes into more detail singling out Bukhara at Coney Island Avenue and Cortelyou. The Halal food guide zabihah lists these and others. And speaking of Halal, here's a great Brooklyn-centric thread on middle eastern restaurants which makes me want to return immediately to Yemen Cafe on Atlantic Ave.

[january 30, 2007]

brooklyn's chinatown |

...is supposedly rapidly turning into "Vietnamesetown." We've all been suffering serious pho withdrawal since leaving Ottawa. NYC seems like its all about the banh mi but apparently there are some good pho candidates in Sunset Park. Some promising links:

Suffering from a bad case of WCW (World Cup Withdrawal) so I updated the links to include a bunch of World Cup links and I'm watching Fox Soccer's ridiculously low budget and yet entertaining "Ticket to Germany" program. Check out Bobby Mc Mahon's blog, good stuff.

I can vouch for the awesomeness of Taam Tov, a kosher Uzbek restaurant hidden up a flight of stairs in midtown's jewellery district. I haven't tried the other place she mentions. Some other good restaurant recos in this blog, sounds like we should visit Astoria.

An abortive trip to "little brazil" (46th between 5th and 6th). I guess we were late (noon) but Ipanema and Via Brasil were both packed (actually Via Brasil had their doors locked) and an Irish pub on the same block was charging a $10 cover. We ended up at an upscale pub called Connolly's near Park Ave. I think next time we'll stick with our place Jameson's at 52nd and 2nd Ave.

(via worldcupblog) Running World Cup commentary from The Sun. A "gem" from today's Spain-Tunisia match: "The rain on Spain is making them look very plain." Groan. Still, a step up from reading liveblogs for those of us not brazen enough to watch world cup video at work.

Its been almost six years since Rebecca Mead's New Yorker article "You've Got Blog". This link is not really about blogging but it reminded me of that time and the birth of this site which was inspired by that article.

(via sjt) How to write unmaintainable code. Please use this for good and not evil... To paraphrase Tolstoy: maintainable code is all alike, each piece of unmaintainable code is unmaintainable in its own way.

We're planning to explore Jackson Heights today and hopefully get some nice clothes for baby Nandika to wear at her rice feeding ceremony. Ok, who am I kidding, I'm just going there to eat. Sounds like besides the subcontinental there are lots of great Colombian (hot dogs? arepas???) and other South American delicacies to be had as well.

Turns out Jackson Heights isn't just a Little India these days. Arguably the most ethnically diverse section of New York's most ethnically diverse borough, it hosts significant populations from South America, Asia, even Russia -- a true example of the cliched melting pot. "Traditionally, Jackson Heights is where Indian women come to shop for clothing and jewelry before they get married, but the neighborhood has grown to something beyond that," said Lurie. "This really is a crossroads for Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Chinese and South Americans."
- article in wapo

(via freakonomics) Malcolm Gladwell is Canadian! Oh, and he also wrote this piece in the New Yorker about the logic of Ivy League admissions policies.

The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.”

I couldn't help but think of the interview for one of the Masters Programs to which I had applied. One of the interviewers said something along the lines that they were looking to distinguish their program by finding people capable of leadership in their careers.

So I guess Maciej Idlewords lives somewhere near me. He's written a nice piece on travelling up the Gowanus canal. This especially is true and probably strikes anyone who comes to New York from a place that has a pleasant waterfront:

I have been puzzled since moving here by the strange relationship New Yorkers have with their waterfront. You would hardly think this is an island city. For every enjoyable stretch of coastline like Pelham Bay, Coney Island, or the East Village, there are a dozen miles of waterfront that are fenced off and abandoned (Greenpoint), blocked by highways (much of Manhattan and Brooklyn) or gratuitously kept out of reach by landscaping that ignores the water altogether (Red Hook, Battery Park City). It would be one thing if the waterfront were packed with high-end developed properties - at least then the inaccessibility would make some kind of evil sense. But most of the Brooklyn riverfront consists of rusty, fenced-off industrial space, left over from an earlier era and never reclaimed.

There's also some cracks about Park Slope in there. For the record, we live in Windsor Terrace...unless you think Park Slope is really cool in which case we live in Park Slope.

Also check out Mr. Ceglowski's paintings at http://oiloncanvas.net. Here's the train I take every day to school and back as seen from the Gowanus Canal:

First, there were hilarious Amazon reviews. Now there is hilarious eBay feedback. Rock on! A sampling:

Has intestinal FORTITUDE!!! Eats PORTIONED meals!!! Enjoys NOURISHMENT!!!
I'll bid on you til there's nothing left but crumbs! Then I'll bid on the crumbs
I'm originally from Japan. Becky8 rhymes with vegetable drawer in Japanese.

One of the arguments he debunks is "The Market Is Efficient, So Expensing Does Not Matter Because the Information Must Be in Prices Already." I wonder whether reporting something in a footnote of a statement actually affects a valuation less than if it were reported in the body. Intuitively this seems true since these are more likely to be misinterpreted or missed altogether, especially by individual investors (a.k.a. chumps) like me. But in the case of a company like Cisco one would expect price to be determined by institutional investors who would hopefully be less susceptible to any footnoted funny business.

"The Teenager's Guide to the Real World" by the guy who created Howstuffworks.com... Something about his writing style sucked me in. Also, forget teenagers, a lot of this advice is kind of useful to me. And I'm 30. Of course it all could just be a gross oversimplification.

From the above discussion you should be able to see a fact of life that is important:

IF YOU DON’T PAY THE RENT, YOU ARE HOMELESS

It turns out that this is the central reality from which adults derive all their decisions. Almost everything else adults do makes sense once you realize, understand and appreciate this fact of life. Right now you are oblivious to this fact of life because by living with your parents you are living in a dream world. Once you leave this dream world and start living on your own, you will be acutely aware of this particular fact of life.

(via sjt) Who better than Microsoft to teach parents the arcane rules of "leetspeak"? Its actually not too bad an article when it takes an anthropological/linguistic perspective but the bit where they warn about certain words whose "use could be an indicator that your teenager is involved in the theft of intellectual property" is somewhat blatant.

Lecture notes from Robert Jarrow, a prof at Cornell and one of the creators of the Heath-Jarrow-Morton model for pricing interest-rate sensitive securities. In "My Life as a Quant" Derman explains the genesis of a competing model that he helped to develop along with Fischer Black. Anyways, Jarrow's notes cover some of the same ground and are relatively comprehensible.

Want to impress the kiddies and gross out the mommies on Halloween night? Extreme Pumpkin has the scoop, from the mundane ("What tools work best?") to the profane ("How to Make Fake Blood" ), on the latest in jack o'lantern engineering.

To transfer the design to the pumpkin, poke a series of holes along the design with a nail or pen. We tried to automate this process with an air nailer. We should probably just tell you it didn't work out.

(via daily dose of imagery) You know your site is popular when it spawns a parody...so I guess DDOI was overdue for this. The "Daily Dose of Generic Photos" (DDOGP) presents an "alternative perspective" on Sam Javranouh's daily shots of Toronto complete with a snarky rewrite of the caption. In a way I guess this is an attack on Sam's photos but still, its hilarious and it seems like Sam has a thick enough skin to realize it since he was the one who linked to it!

i snuck onto the roof of the building my mom's in, and took this shot. unfortunatly, my low-quality "Canun" off-brand camera has terrible shutter lag, so I was only able to catch 3 of the 7 planes that happened to fly by at exactly the time I was taking the photo.

Thorough article from an Indian business magazine about the recent surge in Cisco's India sales. Cisco is expecting India to be a US$1 billion market by 2007. By way of comparison, Chinanex, a site specializing in information about the Chinese telecom market, estimates that Cisco's China sales in 2003 were approximately $2 billion - 10% of the total and second only to Japan in the Asia-Pacific region.

(via Dad) NY Times notes the profusion of Bengali-language newspapers.

So now in New York City, more newspapers are printed in Bengali than in any other South Asian language. The City Planning Department estimates that there are 38,500 Urdu speakers and 47,500 Bengali speakers in the city, but Bengali newspapers outnumber Urdu newspapers two to one.

(via Greenspun's blog) A nice little web app to analyse word frequency from the first debate and it cleverly shows each instance of the word in context.

Turns out my perception of Bush's use of "Khan network" was a bit off (he only said it twice). It does confirm that he really went to town on "mixed" (eight times), "messages" (seven times) and "signal/signals" (seven times). The other argument Bush kept hammering on was that Kerry had seen the same intelligence as he had - Bush used the word "intelligence" ten times!

[october 1, 2004]

debate |

Um...Kerry won. I supported going into Iraq, I've supported Bush in the past, but I have to say that Kerry won and if I were American I would vote for him.

Best bits - when Kerry said "don't confuse the war with the warriors" and when he threw George Sr.'s words in Bush's face on occupying Iraq. I think Bush said "A. Q. Khan's network" and a few other phrases more then ten times each. I'd like to see a word frequency analysis.

In DFAIT's India travel advisory travellers are warned: "Pirate attacks and armed robbery against ships in South Asia occur. Mariners should take appropriate precautions." Luckily, you can keep track of recent acts of piracy on the International Chamber of Commerce's weekly piracy report linked above. Looks like it is no laughing matter, in the "actual or attempted attacks" section one can find this chilling entry:

Toronto photoblogger extraordinare Sam Javanrouh just celebrated the 1st anniversary of "Daily Dose of Imagery" with a collage/wallpaper of the past year's pics and a load of beautifully presented stats. Be sure to check out the timelapse video he mentions, it is really cool.

(via thorntree) List of 100 Wonders of the World. How many have you seen? Chosen based on tourist popularity which probably explains some of the less inspiring entries, but even so a fun list. I've seen seventeen and would love to add Meenakshi, Borobudur and Macchu Pichu to the list.

(via bookslut) Louisa Waugh's "Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia" looks like a good read, not least because it has won what bookslut terms "the weirdest literature prize ever" for best evoking the spirit of a place. And while we're on the subject of Mongolia and evoking, one of the best passages in Trisha Sng's account of her trip around the world is this bit about travelling the Trans-Mongolian rail:

I felt an immense joy bursting in my heart as I clung to the window. The perfect blue in the sky. The vanishing orange in the distance. The moon danced about as the train rounded curves after curves. The taiga forests zipped by silently. The repetitive and now comforting 'tuk-TUK tuk-TUK' was the only sound in the night. Fog caused distant lights to be hauntingly vague and eerie. I still couldn't believe I was on the Trans-Mongolian Rail, which will eventually transport me one-third round the world. This was special. This was magic.

Going through Heathrow in 2002, we wanted to leave the airport so had to go through customs. There were two lines, one for regular joes and a super-fast line for EU hoes. There were some Polish girls getting a hard time from the customs officer and a woman in front of us in line said something like "they're Polish, can't they go in the other line?" to which the lady keeping us in line replied disdainfully "Poland is not Europe." Well, now it is!

(via http://blogdex.net) Fun flash game from Lego: take your legos apart and put them together to make different gadgets and use them to accomplish increasingly challenging goals. One comment though: you can't make a gadget (e.g. a buggy, a duck, a tugboat, etc.) unless you pick up a plan for it somewhere on the gameboard. Makes sense here but when I was a kid there were no plans! (curmudgeon mode off)

Discovered this article in the comments on a recent Greenspun post lamenting the fact that despite a decade of the "consumer web" realtors still charge 6% commissions. Its an article on University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt who uses the techniques of economics in order to answer some pretty interesting questions.

For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt?

And yes, Levitt's answers to all of these questions can be found in the article.

Sciam article gives some more details about what happened during DARPA's Grand Challenge.

Meanwhile one of the dark horses in the race is closing in on the two leaders. Professional roboticists observing the competitors had doubted that DAD, a pickup modified by David and Bruce Hall at Velodyne, would get far at all. Its only means of sensing terrain ahead is a pair of color video cameras. Because cameras produce so much data, they are notoriously difficult to use for high-speed navigation.

DARPA's "Grand Challenge" (which was mentioned here back in January 2003...its actually still on this page) went off this past weekend with spectacular results. Spectacularly bad! Just to refresh your memory this was supposed to be a robot race (c.f. "Cannonball Run") roughly from LA to Las Vegas - about 140 miles. The "winner", the team from Carnegie-Mellon, travelled a grand total of 7.4 miles. The "final data" presented above presents a woeful picture of the competition:

At mile 1.3, vehicle veered off course, went through a fence, tried to come back on the road, but couldn’t get through the fence again...